Kashmiri Muslims

So for me, I was like, "Football? In Kashmir?" And they were like, "Yeah." And, uh, they were like, "You know, we need to meet the founders of this club." And now what was the beauty of this club was, in India we have a lot of religions.

The founders of this club were a Kashmiri Hindu and a Kashmiri Muslim, okay? And these two men had come together in a place like Kashmir, where you don't have the resources that any other place, any normal place, and I'm s- sad to use the word normal, you know, but the resources that any other place would have.

And these two founders came together, formed a club, and literally gave purpose to a lot of youth there, because a lot of stone-pelters, a lot of kids who were not going to college had come down to play for this club.

And within three years, this club was playing professionally.

It went through to the '90s.

It painted Kashmiri Muslims as the agitators, as terrorists, as bloodthirsty, as wanting to drive out anyone who wasn't Muslim, and it was then, uh, kind of used to propel this myth that, uh, Kashmiri Hindus were killed in great numbers, were driven out of the valley.

This is what the Kashmir Files did because it took its inspiration directly from, um, Hindutva propaganda, which is es- essentially there to demonize Muslims and utilize a lot of Islamophobia.

So I think, you know, from my point of view, why it was so important for a Kashmiri filmmaker to be telling the story is that we finally get a voice.

Wow.

And Muslims, as we know, feel quite beleaguered within India, right?

Yes, I think you kind of see this, you know, this rise of this new kind of Hindu national project Modi is putting forward.

And I think many people feel it's very different.

You know, Hindu, Kashmiri Hindus eat meat.

It's very different.

You know, Kashmiri Muslims used to practice the form of Sufism.

So it was very much a region... not kind of divided by religion, but that was a very harmonious culture before you kind of see this unrest that's taken place.

It's a radical, the entire government, the judiciary, the media, everybody has been radicalized to that extent that whatever the government does is stamped by approval by everybody overwhelmingly.

Even those people inside India that oppose the BJP, that suffer under the BJP, that suffer under fascism, For example, Indian Muslims, for example, the Sikh minorities, for example, the Christian minorities.

Even they approved to some extent, you know, maybe more recently it's changed, but they have approved because Kashmir has always been a particular line that nobody wants to cross.

And for years upon years, and it's not just the BJP, even the Congress government, the opposition, the one of Gandhi, they made sure that Kashmir is the red line for everybody, that Kashmir is the rallying point for all minorities.

That's the problem.

How do they get to that point where they can do whatever they want? They can be considered to be the rape capital of the world.

They can lynch Muslims on suspicion of carrying beef.

They can annex an entire territory and its population.